Culture. Living Organization.

In the old days, strategy and structure told us how things were supposed to work – the designed organization. Something was also telling us that structure doesn’t quite match reality – the lived organization. We’ve moved a long way to appreciate the organization today as a place of living and expression as much as a place of processes, roles or corporate outcomes. Ultimately, culture plays a big part in corporate success, and failure.

Culture was a trendy topic some thirty to forty years ago, before we realized some challenges with working out what it really means and how to measure it. Maybe more cult than culture.

The challenge with culture is what we are measuring and why. Is there ‘good’ and ‘bad’ culture? How do we decide on factors to assess values, beliefs and assumptions? And assuming we can identify meaningful insights, how does it relate to what we are trying to achieve?

One of the biggest factors is the choice of culture as an aspiration from ‘benchmark’ studies – ‘we should be like that’ – or culture as an understanding of what drives our organization behavior here and now. Does that fit with our strategy and goals? Me Too approaches may help with obvious direct comparators, but to change culture, the underlying values, beliefs, and norms have to change. That doesn’t happen for quite a while. Even if you change behavior or mimic trailblazer characteristics, that doesn’t necessarily deal with culture. It could be just compliance.

Culture insights can now be a little more visible and a little less reliant on someone’s intuition, speculation, or the occasional away day. Cultural evaluation was a bit science and a lot art – a little more science now. A choice of approach and method needs consideration, and tailoring.

Virtually all aspects of strategy and organization development take something from cultural insights. However, it should be viewed as part of overall Organization Capability, and so it needs to be related to other parts of Capability before it can become a really useful evaluation. People (Profile), Structure (Design), Strategy (Intent) and the prevailing local culture are significant factors in how organization culture is interpreted.